Mother. I don't feel fullness. Right now I only feel my own lack of everything. What is this pretty stick, so crushable? Growing from the curve of a green tree. It's bruised, and thinks it knows what pain is. But it doesn't grasp that the cure for pain is pain. I do not grasp that the cure for pain is pain.

It's green and thinks it knows what new life is. But it hasn't died yet, so how can it know?

My camel has gotten thoroughly stuck inside the needle's eye. I can't seem to die. I'll try. Who is this "I"?

March 23, 2011

Have you ever looked at someone and seen their soul? Did you forget your self, your selfish existence, step outside your body and see only the light shining from the face of your friend?

When that happened, it changed my perspective. Nothing ever seems linear to me anyway, but this has knocked me back a few steps and made me perceive the world in the round.

I've been scratching and digging at the seams of my shell, trying to splinter it to bits. I don't want to live here anymore. It's not that I have the urge to self-destruct - I'm just tired of living for only myself. Dissolve. Join the River.

There's a dance of righteous abandon going on right under my nose; beneath my skin. I'll never feel it if I stare too long and hard at my own bellybutton. The dance demands the abandonment of me. I want to be a vehicle of Love. I don't want to be clinging, gripping, chewing on five-day old apple cores just to fill the void in my belly, when there's so much to GIVE around here. Join the flow and forget your self.

March 15, 2011

Morgan Russell, Still-Life Synchromy, "lyrically arranged colors are as capable of conveying a message as are finely orchestrated musical notes"

"I was a hidden treasure and I desired to be known, so I created the world." -So goeth the oft-quoted hadith.

The concept of G-d as a singular light, shone through the mirror-like prism of creation and refracted into varied beings and experiences is neatly illustrated by Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon album cover. See below:

Ah, yes, the ubiquitous Pink Floyd. When I was at community college, I used to keep a running tally of all the Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon, Bob Marley and Ralphie Wiggum "I bent my wookie" shirts I saw in a semester. A popular image, no doubt. There's something mystical and beautiful about prisms, and the rainbows they refract. I ask for wonder....

Some people are mirrors. Some delightful; others disgusting. I'm sure you know what I'm talking about. The person who annoys you the most might be there in your life as a kind of "Hey man, over here!" from the Infinite, trying to tell you that the thing you hate most about that person is, in fact, your biggest fault, and something maybe you could work on...

Sometimes the experience of meeting a mirror is pure bliss, if only because you feel... understood. I can't overstate the value of this as an artist and self-proclaimed "weird person."

But all mirrors have their jagged edges, and if you hold too tightly you can get pretty cut and bloody. And then you get tired of pussy-footing around and just want it to cut clean through. It reminds me of this silly man who once asked me if, by taking so many insulin shots in my abdomen, I would eventually cut my body clean in half. Ha.

Man, this kind of hurts, though. One of my Harbingers of Education has returned. So, yes, pain, but I always learn fantastic illuminative lessons when they're around, so it's also kind of exciting.

What I'm trying to say (in a way that might indicate the necessity of some kind of therapy) is that pain creates soul growth. So, bring it.

After all, those who wake up from Near Death Experiences often bring back the same story, specifically, that an angel reviews their life so far and then asks them two questions:

How much did you LEARN?

How much did you LOVE?

This is basically the textbook NDE. No really; in my college Psychology class we had this delightfully weird professor who brought holograms to class and let us grade some of our own exams. There was an NDE book and it was required reading...

March 14, 2011

I went for a walk this morning. The sky was overcast, and I saw inky grey-blue clouds rolling in as the wind began to howl and moan. A lone dove overhead cooed a mournful, gentle song. The landscape looked dimmer than usual, but there was the silvery sun, peeking through clouds and casting a glow that caught in the tangles of new bright green leafy buds on skinny little white branches, silhouetted against the deep evergreens. It was beautiful. I stood in front of the pond behind my neighborhood, rooted to the spot. I didn't ever want to leave.

I've been thinking about Love, and all it's supposed forms. There is supposedly pure and impure versions of it; some bright and clean, some adulturated. But I'm trying to see just one Love.

Cynthia Bourgeault is an evil genius and/or a saint. I enjoy reading her books and Rami Shapiro's for the same reason: a unitive view of the world. Seeing with a "single" eye; seeing the interconnectedness of all things. Seeing only One.

I'm quite fixated on a concept of hers I read recently: that there is not "Eros" and "Agape" Love; rather, the two are the raw and refined versions of the same force. Eros, the driving, romantic desire for another, can be refined in the fires of kenosis - that state of continuous pouring-out, or letting-be, that accepts all things and clings to nothing - and when it has been filtered, and loses the particular drive to possess or dominate the object of it's Love, and instead desires only that the object become Who he/she truly is, then it has become Agape. It becomes wind; it uplifts. It becomes light; it illuminates.